Notes on Shawl Design

Now, as Miss Cleo was wont to say in her heyday, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking,

"Cut the crap, child. We know perfectly well that the extended ruminations on literature and the squiggly cartoons and the guest appearances by your fictitious slutty sheep houseguest are mere smoke and mirrors intended to distract us from sad reality. You haven't been knitting anything interesting, have you? Have you?

To which I can only respond, in the words of (I believe) Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Neener neener neener."

Because I have been knitting my furry little fingers to bits. But since you had to get huffy, all you get to see for now is the swatch.



This is the "final" swatch, in which the yarn, the needles, and the stitch patterns at last got together and danced in perfect lockstep around the living room while the orchestra played a spirited rendition of "You Got to See Your Mama Every Night (Or You Can't See Mama at All)."

We have here a laceweight cashmere/silk laceweight procured my homie in Boston, manipulated with size 1 Addi Turbos using stitch patterns collected by that nice Miss Walker, plus a lace alphabet to which I was introduced by one of the goddesses in my household pantheon.

As I will never have the pleasure of regaling a child of my own with stories of the labor pains he caused me, I instead look forward to forcing my niecephew to listen as I tell of how Uncle Franklin turned the world upside down and shook it so as to discover novel, seldom-seen lace patterns to put into this christening shawl.

As evidence I shall present a series of swatches which, laid end to end, would stretch all the way from Rhinebeck to Toronto and back again, except these days good luck getting customs officials at the border to cooperate. These swatches include motifs from the Estonian, Shetland, Orenberg, Asian, and Eastern European camps. They were begged from august lace knitting authorities, painstakingly recreated from fuzzy magazine illustrations, puzzled out of antique books and magazines.

And, ultimately, the winning patterns were taken from Barbara Walker, volume one, where they are located on facing pages directly opposite one another.

(But don't let that make you feel guilty. I did it out of love.)

And, as you will have guessed from the A-B-C, there will be a special message for the little kid worked into the finished piece. I'd like it to be a surprise for the parents on the Big Day, so I'll just share some of the options that were considered, then rejected:

• WHERE DID YOU COME FROM, BABY DEAR?
• WELCOME TO THE CLUB
• GOD BLESS THE CHILD THAT'S GOT HIS OWN
• PEE ON THIS SHAWL AND YOU WON'T GET ANOTHER PRESENT OUTTA ME UNTIL YOU'RE FORTY-SIX
  
• BE THANKFUL THIS ISN'T A BRIS
  
• DON'T WORRY, YOU CAN STILL BECOME A BUDDHIST LATER ON

That's my problem, you see. I just have so many good ideas, there could never be enough time to knit all of them.